When I was a young lad, I loved New Warriors. It was a fun book; not a great one, but it was usually entertaining. Generally new characters (how Nova could be considered a New Anything escapes me now, but I suppose he hadn’t been used in around 15 years), lots of adventure, banter, bickering, and wackiness, the latter generally courtesy of Speedball.
There have been a couple attempts to resurrect the franchise since those early glory years; I haven’t read any of them. I gather they were a big deal in Civil War, but I didn’t read that book.
So, I admit, I picked up the new New Warriors largely out of nostalgia. As I said, I didn’t read Civil War, but I followed enough to get the general premise, from which springs this book: A group of young upstart superheroes take the name of a disgraced team to stick it to Tony Stark. I can get into that. The original book was about a bunch of young heroes who wanted to be Avengers; it seems fitting to reincarnate the concept with characters who are anti-establishment.
Alas. While it was nostalgia that led me to the book, it’s modern continuity that it’s tied to: Apparently all the New Warriors are former heroes in new identities, several of them tied to M-Day, the event that depowered a large portion of the mutant population. Sophia, who I gather used to be in New X-Men (the New Mutants version, not the Grant Morrison one), is the main character for the first issue, settling into life as a human but dreaming about flying. Then the Mystery Hunk at the restaurant where she works turns out to be Beak of New X-Men (The Grant Morrison version, not the New Mutants one). And there’s some covert superheroing going on which involves busting the Grey Gargoyle and Anaconda, but it’s a mystery to some cops.
I suppose this could be an entertaining read if you followed Sophia in New X-Men, but as it stands this is just another story of someone who gave up being a superhero but might want to come back to it. It’s generally based around recognizing a couple characters from some recent fringe books, along with (presumably) some Civil War fallout.
As much as they look pretty silly, this is actually a book that needs a few more colons in the title to explain just what the heck it’s about. You know, something like The Initiative: X-Men: M-Day: New Warriors. Or possibly New Ex-Mutant Warriors.
It’s ultimately just average. Not bad, but probably not good enough to merit a second issue. I’d probably be more convinced if it had some newer characters, but positioning itself as a sequel to New X-Men doesn’t do much for me. The art by Paco Medina is similarly average: It’s competent, nothing to complain about but not particularly impressive.
There might be some interesting ideas in here, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to be presented with much life. The original New Warriors book may have been somewhat generic, but at least it was fun and interesting.